Speculative Everything : Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
Mar 30, 2023
Welcome message from author
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
Speculative EverythingsPECULATIVE EVERYTHInG DEsIGn,FICTIOn, AnD sOCIAL DREAMInG
AnTHOnY DUnnE & FIOnA RABY
THE MIT PREss CAMBRIDGE,MAssACHUsETTs LOnDOn,EnGLAnD
9808.indb 3 9/23/13 5:47 PM
© 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording,
or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from
the publisher.
MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for
business or sales promotional use. For information, please email
[email protected].
This book was set in Letter Text and Chlotz by the MIT Press. Art direction
and typeface by Kellenberger-White. Printed and bound in the United States of
America.
Dunne, Anthony.
by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.
pages cm
1. Design—Philosophy. I. Raby, Fiona. II. Title.
NK1505.D865 2013
745.4—dc23
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
9808_000.indd 4 10/2/13 10:52 AM
contents
2 A Map of Unreality 11
3 Design as Critique 33
4 Consuming Monsters: Big, Perfect, Infectious 47
5 A Methodological Playground: Fictional Worlds and Thought Experiments 69
6 Physical Fictions: Invitations to Make-Believe 89
7 Aesthetics of Unreality 101
8 Between Reality and the Impossible 139
9 Speculative Everything 159
vi PREFACE
PREFACE
Speculative Everything began as a list we created a few years ago called A/B, a
sort of manifesto. In it, we juxtaposed design as it is usually understood with
the kind of design we found ourselves doing. B was not intended to replace A
but to simply add another dimension, something to compare it to and facilitate
discussion. Ideally, C, D, E, and many others would follow.
This book unpacks the B bit of the list, making connections between
usually disparate ideas, locating them within an expanded notion of
contemporary design practice, and establishing some historical links. It is not
a straightforward survey, anthology of essays, or monograph but offers a
very specific view of design based on several years of experimentation,
teaching, and reflection. We use examples from our own practice, student
and graduate work from the Royal College of Art, and other projects from fine
art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. In researching this book
we also surveyed literature from futurology, cinematic and literary fiction,
political theory, and the philosophy of technology.
The ideas in this book move from a general setting out of what
conceptual design is, through its use as a critical medium for exploring the
implications of new developments in science and technology, to the aesthetics
of crafting speculative designs. It ends by zooming out to explore the idea of
“speculative everything” and design as a catalyst for social dreaming.
Speculative Everything is an intentionally eclectic and idiosyncratic
journey through an emerging cultural landscape of ideas, ideals, and
approaches. We hope designers interested in doing more than making
technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable will find this book enjoyable,
stimulating and inspiring.
vii PREFACE
Fictional functions
Change the world to suit us
Science fiction
Functional fictions
Social fiction
Parallel worlds
viii ACKNoWLEDgMENTS
ACknOwLEDGMEnTs
The ideas in this book have taken shape over many years through
conversations and exchanges with many people. We would like to thank the
following in particular for their support and help throughout the development
of this project.
our teaching activities at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London are a
constant source of inspiration; we are privileged to work with supremely
talented students whose projects never cease to challenge and push our own
thinking. In Design Products, we would like to thank Platform 3, Durrell
Bishop, onkar Kular, Ron Arad, and Hilary French; in Architecture, ADS4,
gerrard o’Carroll and Nicola Koller; and more recently, the amazingly talented
staff and students of the Design Interactions program, particularly James
Auger, Noam Toran, Nina Pope, Tom Hulbert, David Muth, Tobie Kerridge, Elio
Caccavale, David Benqué and Sascha Pohflepp; as well as a very long list of
guests who have dropped by and generously shared their ideas and thoughts in
lectures and critiques. We are extremely grateful to the RCA for being the
sort of place where it is not only possible to develop work and ideas like this
but it is also actively encouraged and supported.
We have always believed in the importance of discussing and developing
ideas in a broader context than academia alone, and thank in particular Wendy
March at Intel and Alex Taylor at Microsoft Research Cambridge for bringing an
industry perspective to our research; Paul Freemont and Kirsten Jensen at
Imperial College, London, for their support and encouragement in our
explorations into synthetic biology and other areas of science; and the many
people who have provided opportunities to share our thinking through talks,
workshops, and conferences and to benefit from the challenges, questions,
and discussions they have sparked. We are also thankful for the generosity
and enthusiasm of the people and organizations who have commissioned and
exhibited our work making it possible to engage with a wider public audience.
In particular, Michael John gorman at The Science gallery; Jan Boelen at Z33;
Constance Rubin and the Saint-Etienne International Design Biennial; James
Peto and Ken Arnold at The Wellcome Trust; Deyan Sudjic, Nina Due, and Alex
Newson at the Design Museum in London; and especially Paola Antonelli at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York for her inspiring and passionate commitment
to making more room in the world for design like this.
over the last few years we have enjoyed a rich and ongoing exchange of
ideas around interactions between design, fiction, science, technology, and
9808.indb 8 9/23/13 5:47 PM
ix ACKNoWLEDgMENTS
futures with a number of people we would like to thank: Bruce Sterling, oron
Catts, Jamer Hunt, David Crowley, Stuart Candy, and Alexandra Midal.
And of course, we are very grateful to Doug Sery, our editor at MIT
Press, for taking on this project and his enthusiastic support and
encouragement throughout its development. For the smooth and enjoyable
process of putting everything together we’d like to thank the brilliant team
at the MIT Press for being so patient and accommodating, especially Katie
Helke Doshina for steering us through the production process, designer Erin
Hasley, and Deborah Cantor-Adams for editing.
We’re very grateful to everyone who provided images for the book, and
to Elizabeth glickfeld for her dedicated detective work and picture research
as well as Marcia Caines and Akira Suzuki for local picture sourcing. Finally,
we’d like to thank Kellenberger-White for their graphic design advice and
designing a special typeface for this book.
9808.indb 9 9/23/13 5:47 PM
9808.indb 10 9/23/13 5:47 PM
1 BEYoND RADICAL DESIgN?
BEYOnD RADICAL DEsIGn?
Dreams are powerful. They are repositories of our desire. They animate
the entertainment industry and drive consumption. They can blind
people to reality and provide cover for political horror. But they
can also inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different
than they are today, and then believe we can progress toward that
imaginary world.1
It is hard to say what today’s dreams are; it seems they have been downgraded
to hopes—hope that we will not allow ourselves to become extinct, hope that
we can feed the starving, hope that there will be room for us all on this tiny
planet. There are no more visions. We don’t know how to fix the planet and
ensure our survival. We are just hopeful.
9808.indb 1 9/23/13 5:47 PM
2 CHAPTER 1
As Fredric Jameson famously remarked, it is now easier for us to imagine
the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism. Yet alternatives are
exactly what we need. We need to dream new dreams for the twenty-first
century as those of the twentieth century rapidly fade. But what role can
design play?
When people think of design, most believe it is about problem solving.
Even the more expressive forms of design are about solving aesthetic
problems. Faced with huge challenges such as overpopulation, water
shortages, and climate change, designers feel an overpowering urge to work
together to fix them, as though they can be broken down, quantified, and
solved. Design’s inherent optimism leaves no alternative but it is becoming
clear that many of the challenges we face today are unfixable and that the
only way to overcome them is by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and
behavior. Although essential most of the time, design’s inbuilt optimism can
greatly complicate things, first, as a form of denial that the problems we
face are more serious than they appear, and second, by channeling energy
and resources into fiddling with the world out there rather than the ideas and
attitudes inside our heads that shape the world out there.
Rather than giving up altogether, though, there are other possibilities
for design: one is to use design as a means of speculating how things could
be—speculative design. This form of design thrives on imagination and aims to
open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to
create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and
to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design
speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship
to reality.
ProBABle/PlAuSiBle/PoSSiBle/PreferABle
Being involved with science and technology and working with many technology
companies, we regularly encounter thinking about futures, especially about
“The Future.” Usually it is concerned with predicting or forecasting the
future, sometimes it is about new trends and identifying weak signals that can
be extrapolated into the near future, but it is always about trying to pin the
future down. This is something we are absolutely not interested in; when it
comes to technology, future predictions have been proven wrong again and
again. In our view, it is a pointless activity. What we are interested in,
though, is the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better
understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want, and,
9808.indb 2 9/23/13 5:47 PM
3 BEYoND RADICAL DESIgN?
of course, ones people do not want. They usually take the form of scenarios,
often starting with a what-if question, and are intended to open up spaces of
debate and discussion; therefore, they are by necessity provocative,
intentionally simplified, and fictional. Their fictional nature requires viewers
to suspend their disbelief and allow their imaginations to wander, to
momentarily forget how things are now, and wonder about how things could be.
We rarely develop scenarios that suggest how things should be because it
becomes too didactic and even moralistic. For us futures are not a destination
or something to be strived for but a medium to aid imaginative thought—to
speculate with. Not just about the future but about today as well, and this is
where they become critique, especially when they highlight limitations that
can be removed and loosen, even just a bit, reality’s grip on our imagination.
As all design to some extent is future oriented, we are very interested
in positioning design speculation in relation to futurology, speculative
culture including literature and cinema, fine art, and radical social science
concerned with changing reality rather than simply describing it or maintaining
it.2 This space lies somewhere between reality and the impossible and to
operate in it effectively, as a designer, requires new design roles, contexts,
and methods. It relates to ideas about progress—change for the better but,
of course, better means different things to different people.
To find inspiration for speculating through design we need to look
beyond design to the methodological playgrounds of cinema, literature,
science, ethics, politics, and art; to explore, hybridize, borrow, and
embrace the many tools available for crafting not only things but also ideas—
fictional worlds, cautionary tales, what-if scenarios, thought experiments,
counterfactuals, reductio ad absurdum experiments, prefigurative futures,
and so on.
In 2009, the futurologist Stuart Candy visited the Design Interactions
program at the Royal College of Art and used a fascinating diagram in his
presentation to illustrate different kinds of potential futures.3 It consisted of
a number of cones fanning out from the present into the future. Each cone
represented different levels of likelihood. We were very taken by this imperfect
but helpful diagram and adapted it for our own purposes.
The first cone was the probable. This is where most designers operate. It
describes what is likely to happen unless there is some extreme upheaval such as
a financial crash, eco disaster, or war. Most design methods, processes, tools,
acknowledged good practice, and even design education are oriented toward
this space. How designs are evaluated is also closely linked to a thorough
understanding of probable futures, although it is rarely expressed in those terms.
9808.indb 3 9/23/13 5:47 PM
4 CHAPTER 1
The next cone describes plausible futures. This is the space of scenario
planning and foresight, the space of what could happen. In the 1970s
companies such as Royal Dutch Shell developed techniques for modeling
alternative near-future global situations to ensure that they would survive
through a number of large-scale, global, economic, or political shifts. The
space of plausible futures is not about prediction but exploring alternative
economic and political futures to ensure an organization will be prepared for
and thrive in a number of different futures.
The next cone is the possible. The skill here is making links between
today’s world and the suggested one. Michio Kaku’s book Physics of the
Impossible4 sets out three classes of impossibility, and even in the third,
the most extreme—things that are not possible according to our current
understanding of science—there are only two, perpetual motion and
precognition, which, based on our current understanding of science, are
impossible. All other changes—political, social, economic, and cultural—
are not impossible but it can be difficult to imagine how we would get from here
to there. In the scenarios we develop we believe, first, they should be
scientifically possible, and second, there should be a path from where we are
today to where we are in the scenario. A believable series of events that led
to the new situation is necessary, even if entirely fictional. This allows
viewers to relate the scenario to their own world and to use it as an aid for
critical reflection. This is the space of speculative culture—writing, cinema,
science fiction, social fiction, and so on. Although speculative, experts are
often consulted when building these scenarios, as David Kirby points out in a
fascinating chapter about distinctions between what he calls speculative
scenarios and fantastic science in his book Lab Coats in Hollywood; the role of
the expert is often, not to prevent the impossible but to make it
acceptable.5
Beyond this lies the zone of fantasy, an area we have little interest in.
Fantasy exists in its own world, with very few if any links to the world we live
in. It is of course valuable, especially as a form of entertainment, but for
us, it is too removed from how the world is. This is the space of fairy tales,
goblins, superheroes, and space opera.
A final cone intersects the probable and plausible. This is the cone
of preferable futures. of course the idea of preferable is not so
straightforward; what does preferable mean, for whom, and who decides?
Currently, it is determined by government and industry, and although we
play a role as consumers and voters, it is a limited one. In Imaginary Futures,
Richard Barbrook explores futures as tools designed for organizing and
9808.indb 4 9/23/13 5:47 PM
5 BEYoND RADICAL DESIgN?
6 CHAPTER 1
justifying the present in the interests of a powerful minority.6 But, assuming
it is possible to create more socially constructive imaginary futures, could
design help people participate more actively as citizen-consumers? And if
so, how?
This is the bit we are interested in. Not in trying to predict the future
but in using design to open up all sorts of possibilities that can be discussed,
debated, and used to collectively define a preferable future for a given
group of people: from companies, to cities, to societies. Designers should
not define futures for everyone else but working with experts, including
ethicists, political scientists, economists, and so on, generate futures that
act as catalysts for public debate and discussion about the kinds of futures
people really want. Design can give experts permission to let their
imaginations flow freely, give material expression to the insights generated,
ground these imaginings in everyday situations, and provide platforms for
further collaborative speculation.
We believe that by speculating more, at all levels of society, and
exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable and,
although the future cannot be predicted, we can help set in place today
factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures
happening. And equally, factors that may lead to undesirable futures can be
spotted early on and addressed or at least limited.
Beyond rAdicAl deSign?
We have long been inspired by radical architecture and fine art that use
speculation for critical and provocative purposes, particularly projects from
the 1960s and 1970s by studios such as Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio,
Ant Farm, Haus-Rucker-Co, and Walter Pichler.7 But why is this so rare in
design? During the Cold War Modern exhibition at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in 2008 we were delighted to finally see so many projects from this
period for real. The exuberant energy and visionary imagination of the
projects in the final room of the exhibition were incredibly inspiring for us.
We were left wondering how this spirit could be reintroduced to contemporary
design and how design’s boundaries could be extended beyond the strictly
commercial to embrace the extreme, the imaginative, and the inspiring.
We believe several key changes have happened since the high point of
radical design in the 1970s that make imaginative, social, and political
speculation today more difficult and less likely. First, during the 1980s design
became hyper-commercialized to such an extent that alternative roles for
9808.indb 6 9/23/13 5:47 PM
7 BEYoND RADICAL DESIgN?
Walter Pichler, TV Helmet (Portable Living Room), 1967. Photograph by
georg Mladek. Photograph courtesy of galerie Elisabeth and Klaus Thoman/
Walter Pichler.
8 CHAPTER 1
design were lost. Socially oriented designers such as Victor Papanek who were
celebrated in the 1970s were no longer regarded as interesting; they were
seen as out of sync with design’s potential to generate wealth and to provide
a layer of designer gloss to every aspect of our daily lives. There was some
good in this—design was embraced by big business and entered the mainstream
but usually only in the most superficial way. Design became fully integrated
into the neoliberal model of capitalism that emerged during the 1980s, and all
other possibilities for design were soon viewed as economically unviable and
therefore irrelevant.
Second, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold
War the possibility of other ways of being and alternative models for society
collapsed as well. Market-led capitalism had won and reality instantly shrank,
becoming one dimensional. There were no longer other social or political
possibilities beyond capitalism for design to align itself with. Anything that
did not fit was dismissed as fantasy, as unreal. At that moment, the “real”
expanded and swallowed up whole continents of social imagination marginalizing
as fantasy whatever was left. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is
no alternative.”
Third, society has become more atomized. As Zygmunt Bauman writes in
Liquid Modernity,8 we have become a society of individuals. People work where
work is available, travel to study, move about more, and live away from their
families. There has been a gradual shift in the United Kingdom from
government that looks after the most vulnerable in society to a small
government that places more responsibility on individuals to manage…
AnTHOnY DUnnE & FIOnA RABY
THE MIT PREss CAMBRIDGE,MAssACHUsETTs LOnDOn,EnGLAnD
9808.indb 3 9/23/13 5:47 PM
© 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording,
or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from
the publisher.
MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for
business or sales promotional use. For information, please email
[email protected].
This book was set in Letter Text and Chlotz by the MIT Press. Art direction
and typeface by Kellenberger-White. Printed and bound in the United States of
America.
Dunne, Anthony.
by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.
pages cm
1. Design—Philosophy. I. Raby, Fiona. II. Title.
NK1505.D865 2013
745.4—dc23
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
9808_000.indd 4 10/2/13 10:52 AM
contents
2 A Map of Unreality 11
3 Design as Critique 33
4 Consuming Monsters: Big, Perfect, Infectious 47
5 A Methodological Playground: Fictional Worlds and Thought Experiments 69
6 Physical Fictions: Invitations to Make-Believe 89
7 Aesthetics of Unreality 101
8 Between Reality and the Impossible 139
9 Speculative Everything 159
vi PREFACE
PREFACE
Speculative Everything began as a list we created a few years ago called A/B, a
sort of manifesto. In it, we juxtaposed design as it is usually understood with
the kind of design we found ourselves doing. B was not intended to replace A
but to simply add another dimension, something to compare it to and facilitate
discussion. Ideally, C, D, E, and many others would follow.
This book unpacks the B bit of the list, making connections between
usually disparate ideas, locating them within an expanded notion of
contemporary design practice, and establishing some historical links. It is not
a straightforward survey, anthology of essays, or monograph but offers a
very specific view of design based on several years of experimentation,
teaching, and reflection. We use examples from our own practice, student
and graduate work from the Royal College of Art, and other projects from fine
art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. In researching this book
we also surveyed literature from futurology, cinematic and literary fiction,
political theory, and the philosophy of technology.
The ideas in this book move from a general setting out of what
conceptual design is, through its use as a critical medium for exploring the
implications of new developments in science and technology, to the aesthetics
of crafting speculative designs. It ends by zooming out to explore the idea of
“speculative everything” and design as a catalyst for social dreaming.
Speculative Everything is an intentionally eclectic and idiosyncratic
journey through an emerging cultural landscape of ideas, ideals, and
approaches. We hope designers interested in doing more than making
technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable will find this book enjoyable,
stimulating and inspiring.
vii PREFACE
Fictional functions
Change the world to suit us
Science fiction
Functional fictions
Social fiction
Parallel worlds
viii ACKNoWLEDgMENTS
ACknOwLEDGMEnTs
The ideas in this book have taken shape over many years through
conversations and exchanges with many people. We would like to thank the
following in particular for their support and help throughout the development
of this project.
our teaching activities at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London are a
constant source of inspiration; we are privileged to work with supremely
talented students whose projects never cease to challenge and push our own
thinking. In Design Products, we would like to thank Platform 3, Durrell
Bishop, onkar Kular, Ron Arad, and Hilary French; in Architecture, ADS4,
gerrard o’Carroll and Nicola Koller; and more recently, the amazingly talented
staff and students of the Design Interactions program, particularly James
Auger, Noam Toran, Nina Pope, Tom Hulbert, David Muth, Tobie Kerridge, Elio
Caccavale, David Benqué and Sascha Pohflepp; as well as a very long list of
guests who have dropped by and generously shared their ideas and thoughts in
lectures and critiques. We are extremely grateful to the RCA for being the
sort of place where it is not only possible to develop work and ideas like this
but it is also actively encouraged and supported.
We have always believed in the importance of discussing and developing
ideas in a broader context than academia alone, and thank in particular Wendy
March at Intel and Alex Taylor at Microsoft Research Cambridge for bringing an
industry perspective to our research; Paul Freemont and Kirsten Jensen at
Imperial College, London, for their support and encouragement in our
explorations into synthetic biology and other areas of science; and the many
people who have provided opportunities to share our thinking through talks,
workshops, and conferences and to benefit from the challenges, questions,
and discussions they have sparked. We are also thankful for the generosity
and enthusiasm of the people and organizations who have commissioned and
exhibited our work making it possible to engage with a wider public audience.
In particular, Michael John gorman at The Science gallery; Jan Boelen at Z33;
Constance Rubin and the Saint-Etienne International Design Biennial; James
Peto and Ken Arnold at The Wellcome Trust; Deyan Sudjic, Nina Due, and Alex
Newson at the Design Museum in London; and especially Paola Antonelli at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York for her inspiring and passionate commitment
to making more room in the world for design like this.
over the last few years we have enjoyed a rich and ongoing exchange of
ideas around interactions between design, fiction, science, technology, and
9808.indb 8 9/23/13 5:47 PM
ix ACKNoWLEDgMENTS
futures with a number of people we would like to thank: Bruce Sterling, oron
Catts, Jamer Hunt, David Crowley, Stuart Candy, and Alexandra Midal.
And of course, we are very grateful to Doug Sery, our editor at MIT
Press, for taking on this project and his enthusiastic support and
encouragement throughout its development. For the smooth and enjoyable
process of putting everything together we’d like to thank the brilliant team
at the MIT Press for being so patient and accommodating, especially Katie
Helke Doshina for steering us through the production process, designer Erin
Hasley, and Deborah Cantor-Adams for editing.
We’re very grateful to everyone who provided images for the book, and
to Elizabeth glickfeld for her dedicated detective work and picture research
as well as Marcia Caines and Akira Suzuki for local picture sourcing. Finally,
we’d like to thank Kellenberger-White for their graphic design advice and
designing a special typeface for this book.
9808.indb 9 9/23/13 5:47 PM
9808.indb 10 9/23/13 5:47 PM
1 BEYoND RADICAL DESIgN?
BEYOnD RADICAL DEsIGn?
Dreams are powerful. They are repositories of our desire. They animate
the entertainment industry and drive consumption. They can blind
people to reality and provide cover for political horror. But they
can also inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different
than they are today, and then believe we can progress toward that
imaginary world.1
It is hard to say what today’s dreams are; it seems they have been downgraded
to hopes—hope that we will not allow ourselves to become extinct, hope that
we can feed the starving, hope that there will be room for us all on this tiny
planet. There are no more visions. We don’t know how to fix the planet and
ensure our survival. We are just hopeful.
9808.indb 1 9/23/13 5:47 PM
2 CHAPTER 1
As Fredric Jameson famously remarked, it is now easier for us to imagine
the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism. Yet alternatives are
exactly what we need. We need to dream new dreams for the twenty-first
century as those of the twentieth century rapidly fade. But what role can
design play?
When people think of design, most believe it is about problem solving.
Even the more expressive forms of design are about solving aesthetic
problems. Faced with huge challenges such as overpopulation, water
shortages, and climate change, designers feel an overpowering urge to work
together to fix them, as though they can be broken down, quantified, and
solved. Design’s inherent optimism leaves no alternative but it is becoming
clear that many of the challenges we face today are unfixable and that the
only way to overcome them is by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and
behavior. Although essential most of the time, design’s inbuilt optimism can
greatly complicate things, first, as a form of denial that the problems we
face are more serious than they appear, and second, by channeling energy
and resources into fiddling with the world out there rather than the ideas and
attitudes inside our heads that shape the world out there.
Rather than giving up altogether, though, there are other possibilities
for design: one is to use design as a means of speculating how things could
be—speculative design. This form of design thrives on imagination and aims to
open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to
create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and
to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design
speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship
to reality.
ProBABle/PlAuSiBle/PoSSiBle/PreferABle
Being involved with science and technology and working with many technology
companies, we regularly encounter thinking about futures, especially about
“The Future.” Usually it is concerned with predicting or forecasting the
future, sometimes it is about new trends and identifying weak signals that can
be extrapolated into the near future, but it is always about trying to pin the
future down. This is something we are absolutely not interested in; when it
comes to technology, future predictions have been proven wrong again and
again. In our view, it is a pointless activity. What we are interested in,
though, is the idea of possible futures and using them as tools to better
understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want, and,
9808.indb 2 9/23/13 5:47 PM
3 BEYoND RADICAL DESIgN?
of course, ones people do not want. They usually take the form of scenarios,
often starting with a what-if question, and are intended to open up spaces of
debate and discussion; therefore, they are by necessity provocative,
intentionally simplified, and fictional. Their fictional nature requires viewers
to suspend their disbelief and allow their imaginations to wander, to
momentarily forget how things are now, and wonder about how things could be.
We rarely develop scenarios that suggest how things should be because it
becomes too didactic and even moralistic. For us futures are not a destination
or something to be strived for but a medium to aid imaginative thought—to
speculate with. Not just about the future but about today as well, and this is
where they become critique, especially when they highlight limitations that
can be removed and loosen, even just a bit, reality’s grip on our imagination.
As all design to some extent is future oriented, we are very interested
in positioning design speculation in relation to futurology, speculative
culture including literature and cinema, fine art, and radical social science
concerned with changing reality rather than simply describing it or maintaining
it.2 This space lies somewhere between reality and the impossible and to
operate in it effectively, as a designer, requires new design roles, contexts,
and methods. It relates to ideas about progress—change for the better but,
of course, better means different things to different people.
To find inspiration for speculating through design we need to look
beyond design to the methodological playgrounds of cinema, literature,
science, ethics, politics, and art; to explore, hybridize, borrow, and
embrace the many tools available for crafting not only things but also ideas—
fictional worlds, cautionary tales, what-if scenarios, thought experiments,
counterfactuals, reductio ad absurdum experiments, prefigurative futures,
and so on.
In 2009, the futurologist Stuart Candy visited the Design Interactions
program at the Royal College of Art and used a fascinating diagram in his
presentation to illustrate different kinds of potential futures.3 It consisted of
a number of cones fanning out from the present into the future. Each cone
represented different levels of likelihood. We were very taken by this imperfect
but helpful diagram and adapted it for our own purposes.
The first cone was the probable. This is where most designers operate. It
describes what is likely to happen unless there is some extreme upheaval such as
a financial crash, eco disaster, or war. Most design methods, processes, tools,
acknowledged good practice, and even design education are oriented toward
this space. How designs are evaluated is also closely linked to a thorough
understanding of probable futures, although it is rarely expressed in those terms.
9808.indb 3 9/23/13 5:47 PM
4 CHAPTER 1
The next cone describes plausible futures. This is the space of scenario
planning and foresight, the space of what could happen. In the 1970s
companies such as Royal Dutch Shell developed techniques for modeling
alternative near-future global situations to ensure that they would survive
through a number of large-scale, global, economic, or political shifts. The
space of plausible futures is not about prediction but exploring alternative
economic and political futures to ensure an organization will be prepared for
and thrive in a number of different futures.
The next cone is the possible. The skill here is making links between
today’s world and the suggested one. Michio Kaku’s book Physics of the
Impossible4 sets out three classes of impossibility, and even in the third,
the most extreme—things that are not possible according to our current
understanding of science—there are only two, perpetual motion and
precognition, which, based on our current understanding of science, are
impossible. All other changes—political, social, economic, and cultural—
are not impossible but it can be difficult to imagine how we would get from here
to there. In the scenarios we develop we believe, first, they should be
scientifically possible, and second, there should be a path from where we are
today to where we are in the scenario. A believable series of events that led
to the new situation is necessary, even if entirely fictional. This allows
viewers to relate the scenario to their own world and to use it as an aid for
critical reflection. This is the space of speculative culture—writing, cinema,
science fiction, social fiction, and so on. Although speculative, experts are
often consulted when building these scenarios, as David Kirby points out in a
fascinating chapter about distinctions between what he calls speculative
scenarios and fantastic science in his book Lab Coats in Hollywood; the role of
the expert is often, not to prevent the impossible but to make it
acceptable.5
Beyond this lies the zone of fantasy, an area we have little interest in.
Fantasy exists in its own world, with very few if any links to the world we live
in. It is of course valuable, especially as a form of entertainment, but for
us, it is too removed from how the world is. This is the space of fairy tales,
goblins, superheroes, and space opera.
A final cone intersects the probable and plausible. This is the cone
of preferable futures. of course the idea of preferable is not so
straightforward; what does preferable mean, for whom, and who decides?
Currently, it is determined by government and industry, and although we
play a role as consumers and voters, it is a limited one. In Imaginary Futures,
Richard Barbrook explores futures as tools designed for organizing and
9808.indb 4 9/23/13 5:47 PM
5 BEYoND RADICAL DESIgN?
6 CHAPTER 1
justifying the present in the interests of a powerful minority.6 But, assuming
it is possible to create more socially constructive imaginary futures, could
design help people participate more actively as citizen-consumers? And if
so, how?
This is the bit we are interested in. Not in trying to predict the future
but in using design to open up all sorts of possibilities that can be discussed,
debated, and used to collectively define a preferable future for a given
group of people: from companies, to cities, to societies. Designers should
not define futures for everyone else but working with experts, including
ethicists, political scientists, economists, and so on, generate futures that
act as catalysts for public debate and discussion about the kinds of futures
people really want. Design can give experts permission to let their
imaginations flow freely, give material expression to the insights generated,
ground these imaginings in everyday situations, and provide platforms for
further collaborative speculation.
We believe that by speculating more, at all levels of society, and
exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable and,
although the future cannot be predicted, we can help set in place today
factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures
happening. And equally, factors that may lead to undesirable futures can be
spotted early on and addressed or at least limited.
Beyond rAdicAl deSign?
We have long been inspired by radical architecture and fine art that use
speculation for critical and provocative purposes, particularly projects from
the 1960s and 1970s by studios such as Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio,
Ant Farm, Haus-Rucker-Co, and Walter Pichler.7 But why is this so rare in
design? During the Cold War Modern exhibition at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in 2008 we were delighted to finally see so many projects from this
period for real. The exuberant energy and visionary imagination of the
projects in the final room of the exhibition were incredibly inspiring for us.
We were left wondering how this spirit could be reintroduced to contemporary
design and how design’s boundaries could be extended beyond the strictly
commercial to embrace the extreme, the imaginative, and the inspiring.
We believe several key changes have happened since the high point of
radical design in the 1970s that make imaginative, social, and political
speculation today more difficult and less likely. First, during the 1980s design
became hyper-commercialized to such an extent that alternative roles for
9808.indb 6 9/23/13 5:47 PM
7 BEYoND RADICAL DESIgN?
Walter Pichler, TV Helmet (Portable Living Room), 1967. Photograph by
georg Mladek. Photograph courtesy of galerie Elisabeth and Klaus Thoman/
Walter Pichler.
8 CHAPTER 1
design were lost. Socially oriented designers such as Victor Papanek who were
celebrated in the 1970s were no longer regarded as interesting; they were
seen as out of sync with design’s potential to generate wealth and to provide
a layer of designer gloss to every aspect of our daily lives. There was some
good in this—design was embraced by big business and entered the mainstream
but usually only in the most superficial way. Design became fully integrated
into the neoliberal model of capitalism that emerged during the 1980s, and all
other possibilities for design were soon viewed as economically unviable and
therefore irrelevant.
Second, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold
War the possibility of other ways of being and alternative models for society
collapsed as well. Market-led capitalism had won and reality instantly shrank,
becoming one dimensional. There were no longer other social or political
possibilities beyond capitalism for design to align itself with. Anything that
did not fit was dismissed as fantasy, as unreal. At that moment, the “real”
expanded and swallowed up whole continents of social imagination marginalizing
as fantasy whatever was left. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is
no alternative.”
Third, society has become more atomized. As Zygmunt Bauman writes in
Liquid Modernity,8 we have become a society of individuals. People work where
work is available, travel to study, move about more, and live away from their
families. There has been a gradual shift in the United Kingdom from
government that looks after the most vulnerable in society to a small
government that places more responsibility on individuals to manage…
Related Documents
